Water Gardening: Dicouraged, 1 by dyzzypyxxy

dyzzypyxxy wrote:
Such interesting pond stories. Bonnie, sounds like you're going to have a really pretty water garden. Watch out for your oranda, they are such slow swimmers that it's way too easy for the birds or raccoons to catch them.

Joy, you should not be discouraged with your lotus plant. They like really warm water as well as a lot of sun to grow well. It's possible that the weather just didn't get hot enough up there in NB this summer for your lotus. If it was in something like a dark-colored half barrel then the water might get a lot warmer and it would bloom. But it might be that the water cooling off at night would slow them down, too. Some people here use waterbed heaters to keep their pond water warm all winter so their plants keep blooming. Lotus are also heavy feeders, so did you give it fertilizer? Mine get 4 or 5 of the little fert tablets (formulated for water gardens) every month once the water is warm. Water in my pond is between 80 and 90 all summer (nights just do not cool off here in July and August).

I am very lucky to have bought a house with a well-established pond. I've never had any fish diseases that I know of, and other than the one incident of a white heron dining on my fish, (orandas) haven't lost any except the big resident pleco two winters ago when we had a record cold winter. He must have been pretty old anyway, because he was 18" long.

My water stays very clear, and I'm pretty sure it's because I have two big clumps of water iris growing in there. I hardly ever even clean the filter and leaf basket, maybe every 6 weeks or so. I let some algae grow because my fish eat it and it's hardly noticeable. After the heron incident, I bought ten 29 cent goldfish from Petsmart. Nine of them are still thriving two years later and last year they had babies, two of which survived. (#10 was found floating in the skimmer the day after he came home) They are fast, and I do not feed them anything except if the duckweed grows in the top of the waterfall, I collect that and give it to them as a treat. Other than that they live on algae. This very likely helps to keep the water clean, too. I have tried to avoid training the fish to come to the surface when they see a person. Nice though this is, the orandas came to the surface when they saw the white heron, and he said 'Yum, lunch'.

My abiding thought about my pond is, if you can keep it 'in balance' the water will be clear, the plants and the fish will be healthy and it will be a joy and not a burden. Finding balance is tricky, but once you get it, with the right amount of plants, fish, sunlight and air in the water, it's a wonderful thing. Mine goes for weeks at a time with just a little cleaning of the odd dead leaves, and topping up the water level as needed from my rain barrel.

Here's my little lotus 'Baby Doll' in bloom.